Survivor Specialisation: Evolve, Adapt and Thrive or Die. (Patreon)

Why specialisation in Kingdom Death is the key to a successful Hunting Party.

Survivors are brought into the world of Kingdom Death with only one difference between them, their gender, which is an effectively cosmetic difference in this game that just determines how pretty your survivor model will be.  As time passes, new generations are born with advantages that their parents didn’t have and the settlement’s hunters become more powerful as they gain experience, but essentially every survivor is a generic tabula rasa to build from.

Survivors:

Before I get onto specialisation, why it is important and how you go about doing it, I think it is worth discussing survivors themselves a little and going through some of the details and broad sweeps that are worth knowing when you are trying to determine what your survivor is going to do when they are out hunting for your settlement.

You can’t always get what you want:

Survivors level in a random fashion, and while there are certain things that they are more likely to get than most, you do not have that much control over this aspect.  Survivors will tend to gain Fighting Arts and Strength more than most other abilities and this is not ideal.  Fighting Arts are very random when you gain them via age and they will range from being useless to potent.  For example, gaining Thrill Seeker on a survivor early on when you are using Rawhide is an incredible boon, especially when you combine it with Surge/Dash – but there is not much you can do to control that happening.  You’re just as likely to get something that is marginal or even useless.

The second issue is you’re more likely to gain strength on a survivor than any other stat, and it’s honestly the second weakest stat to gain stuff in (apart from Speed).  The reason Strength is not so desirable is because weapons naturally become stronger as time passes in the campaign and that means you are gaining more power in an area that you will naturally gain more power in anyway.  

The only real benefit to gaining lots of strength is you can switch up to use lower strength weapons that have unusual properties.  For example a high strength survivor can use daggers effectively by overcoming the largest issue they have – the fact that they can’t wound a monster most of the time because they have garbage tier strength.   Very high strength is also part of the way that high speed weapons can be made effective.

However the problem with this practice is that you are tied to one survivor, if they die or retire then you’re going to have a weapon that’s a possible liability in the hands of anyone else.  

But if you try sometimes, you might just find. You get what you need:

However, we do have a host of things which we can do that give us an element of control over the development of a survivor.  When you get used to it you learn the areas that will give you certain fighting arts/secret fighting arts/abilities/bonuses and you will soon learn to exert what control you can over these; either by preserving the respective survivor except for when they are needed or building them into an overpowering force that will increase your odds of winning significantly.

A good example of this is the Flower Knight; this expansion has three Secret Fighting Arts that are very, beneficial and you can engineer the situation to maximise your chances of getting them.  Fencing (ignore one hit on a 6+) is so potent and generically useful that almost every single survivor you take out on hunts can benefit from it.  You can increase the odds of getting it by simply stacking critical hit chances as much as possible on your party and manipulating the HL deck.  Acanthus Doctors have a chance of being made as long as you make sure you have innovated sculpture before the mistletoe strikes (and you use Protect the Young + Graves to keep population stacked) and True Blade is essentially handed out easily if you are able to get the right disorder plus beat an L3 Flower Knight (which is very easy).

These things are the ones that you aim to hang around a survivor who has already started to progress in a certain direction.  For example, you can take a spare Green Savior and try to turn them into an Acanthus Doctor, doubling up on the power of Green Affinities because both of those two elements work together very effectively.  Looking for opportunities like this is very important and learning how to handle them for the maximum chance of success is a big part of mitigating the randomness in

Other things you come to learn about are tricks like Heart Fluting the Level 1 Hand to your settlement in order to gain +1 Accuracy for survivors who use inaccurate weapons.  But in particular the elements you should jump on maximising the odds of getting are Evasion and Luck, which is why the new Survival of the Fittest (+1 Str, +1 Eva for all survivors) is so strong and why Graves, which has a 50% chance of giving you a survivor with +1 Luck is so important to pick as your principles.

Now I have mentioned them, Principles are another area where you have control over the game.  The true is there is very little actual choice in what the right options are in each category.  There are arguments for both Protect the Young and Survival of the Fittest (for example, taking SotF early in People of the Stars will be problematic as it will reduce the number of top end dragon traits you get, but that can be overcome with careful innovation choices and clever breeding); but there is literally no decision between Graves and Cannibalism; the +1 Luck you gain from Graves is ridiculous if you combine it with a Rib Blade/Katar and a luck stone because the returns in resources and reduced reactions you get from this is priceless.

It’s Time to Suit Up

There is a simple cycle of resources in Kingdom Death; Survivors generate resources, resources make gear, gear protects survivors.  The better your gear is, the more options and power you have when you play and the higher your chances of success.  Kingdom Death is about dealing with randomness, and the main way you do this is by having the resources and flexibility to mitigate the unexpected.  

This is where gear comes in, and gear is the part of the game that you have the most control over and it is where you truly design your hunters.  Yes, a good survivor with excellent stats is a large benefit that is hard to pass up, but without the right weapon, armor and gear they are going to not be anywhere as effective as they could be.

Additionally gear provides the framework for any survivor to step into, whether you are replacing a lost hunter, covering for a temporary absence or keeping a key survivor on the bench to avoid bad settlement events or a nemesis fight, the gear grid you have sorted out will do a huge amount of work even with just a starting survivor wearing it. Your gear is very much your characters and should never be underestimated or skimped on.  This is where your resources return on your investment and it is the part of the game where you should think as much as possible before acting.

So, bringing this all together, what does it mean?

Well, the conclusion I draw from this is that initially your survivor builds should be focused not around the survivors, but the gear.  Good gear does a lot of work and consists of at least 60 to 70% of a survivors build.  Later on however you will find that certain survivors are powerful enough to make you go and create gear to match their abilities and fighting arts.  Good examples of abilities/FAs that demand specific builds include Leyline Walkers, Acanthus Doctors, Clarity of Darkness, Saviours and the fruit from the Lonely Tree.  

This is one of the reasons why I tend to slam as many quarries into the game as possible, because I want to have the options to dip into certain items as appropriate.  I like having that flexibility, even if I’m not going to be going after that particular quarry.  It can be galling to have to give up on a certain build just because you can’t get the right items to help complete it.  

And that brings me onto a big part of setting up for good specialisation.  Quarries.

I’ve found that there are gaps in the Core Game experience, gaps that are not that fun to deal with at times and cause frustrations.  However, I have found that there are three quarries, that between them, make the core game a delight to play with because they give you the options in weapons and support gear that the core game quarries between them lack.  This is because the White Lion tends to cap out on useful gear after 3-5 hunts, the Screaming Antelope is basically there for Screaming Armor + 2-3 Blood Paints and the Phoenix has so much gear that I consider to be kind of trash that it becomes a poor risk/reward ratio quarry very quickly; essentially once you have a Finger of God and an Arc Bow from the Phoenix the rest of the stuff is kind of meh outside of the Hours Ring, Crest Crown and a few situational items.

So the three quarries I put into almost every single campaign in order to fix the problems with the core game are the Gorm, the Dung Beetle Knight and the Sunstalker.  Which, unsurprisingly, the community tends to agree are the best three quarries out there (though the Sunstalker I will admit has gained traction in part because of my tireless campaigning on it).  They fill gaps in builds immensely well, the Gorm because of all the excellent options it gives you for Grand Weapons, Daggers, Swords, Axes and Clubs, the Dung Beetle Knight because of the flexible nature of its gear and armor; and the Sunstalker because of the interesting armor, bows, spears, swords and axes that it provides for the later game – making up for how trash a lot of the lantern weapons are without a Rainbow Wing Belt.  Even as splash monsters all three of these are very interesting and useful to hunt.

Now I have written all of this you should have some idea about the principles behind specialisation and why it’s important to give jobs for each survivor, so it’s next time I will time to look into each of the roles in the game. What they bring and what kind of set up you’re looking for on each.